


Caelestis

by Binario



Series: One-shots to mend (or break) the heart [2]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Gen, Happy birthday to this schemy gremlin, It’s always Claude loving hours, Mentioned Golden Deer Students (Fire Emblem), Minor My Unit | Byleth/Claude von Riegan, This came out shippier than I had visualized it, Worldbuilding, no beta we die like Glenn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-07-24
Packaged: 2021-03-05 18:55:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25500226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Binario/pseuds/Binario
Summary: A star, the endless desert, and the stages of earning a wyvern’s trust.(And maybe finding yourself in the process)
Series: One-shots to mend (or break) the heart [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1847344
Kudos: 23





	Caelestis

**Author's Note:**

> Oh boy, here we go. First time writing Claude in any of my fics. This was written in sporadic bursts of feverish inspiration during serious procrastination sessions. Enjoy!

There is uproar inside the candle-lit hallways of the Royal Palace. Hushed whispers spread through the staff like wildfire, soon to leak out into the city come the first light of morning. Let it not be said that the halls of the Almyran royalty were ever without the vibrant buzz of life that characterized the capital – the splendid colors of the carpets alone were enough to paint the chambers in the vermillion hues of sunset. Nevertheless, it is not the usual effervescence that simmered inside the state.

The royal hatchlings have been born.

Depicted in the national coat of arms, the flock of royal wyverns are one of Almyra’s most treasured possessions. They are the ficklest of all tame mounts, going as far as to violently reject any rider they do not deem as worthy of their service. Any new addition of the esteemed bloodline is celebrated by the people like a holiday. A symbol of the ever-growing might of the kingdom, they claim. A blessing of the land.

Khalid hears it all from the darkness of his balcony. The chambermaids chattering to each other through the gardens fade out of his hearing range. He knows, of course, that the matriarch had laid a clutch last month. It had been next to impossible to ignore his cousins jeering about claiming the new wyvern for their own and finally earning a shot at becoming Barbarossa. He had managed to weasel tidbits of information out of his kin before they grew tired of his presence and demanded he leave them be. It had not been enough, not by a longshot, but it allowed him to predict a tentative hatching day.

Still, it is too early. By a couple of weeks, at least.

He hurries back into his room and dives into the drawers, throwing aside countless shirts and robes in his search. It is now or never; he is not getting a second chance at meeting the hatchlings before his cousins could interfere and make a claim of their own. They might seek retaliation if he manages to pull it off, but it is no skin off his back.

“There you are,” he grumbles at the inconspicuous scarf hiding at the bottom of his drawer. He distractedly arranges it so that it hides his features whilst struggling to find his sandals. They are nowhere to be found and time is of essence – he is going to have to make do without shoes.

Khalid runs on tiptoes to the door, peaking his head out slightly to do a cursory sweep of the hallway. No guards present, the shift rotation is underway. Perfect.

Once out of the room, slipping away unnoticed is not that big of an issue. At eleven years of age, Khalid has already explored all of the corridors and study rooms that have potential for getaway routes. He had been discovered by the servants when he started mapping them out, but months of refining his technique means the prince is more familiar with the twisting halls of his home than even the oldest of maids. It is perhaps the most useful secret in his repertoire, and one that he guards jealously.

The wyvern Roost is slightly more complicated to sneak into. While the royal flock usually prowls the open areas outside the capital city, the whole band retreats back into the open stables inside the palace whenever the matriarch is ready to lay her clutch. It is ideal for the wyverns – no natural predators, refuge from even the most brutal of sandstorms, a continuous supply of fresh food. For the guards on duty that are forced to leave lest they get eaten in territorial displays? Not so much.

That territoriality is what makes Khalid hesitate outside the entrance. Nesting wyverns will not hesitate to strike down any intruders to the nesting site. It is why they usually leave the Roost unattended until after the matriarch brings out her hatchlings to the sunlight. Breaking into the building certainly is a doomed enterprise if he values keeping all of his limbs intact. However, Khalid is nothing if not determined. If he doesn’t do it now, he will never have a chance like this again. The court would fly into a frenzy if he tries it the traditional way and petitions his father for the right to claim the new wyvern. They wouldn’t want the tainted prince having a clear identifier of his Almyran linage. His father would be forced to deny him, lest he face the real danger that the pissed off nobles represent. If he lays the claim on his own, however, they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. He technically is bending the laws near their breaking point, but there isn’t anything specific preventing him from doing this before the hatchlings are to be presented to the king. The court already hated him enough as it is, what’s a new indiscretion against the traditions?

With a renewed resolve, Khalid slips inside the Roost, bare feet stinging from the colder stone of the building. Immediately, a warning snarl makes him freeze on his tracks. A sinuous neck unfurls from the bulky mass half hidden beneath a bundle of fresh hay. Yellow eyes narrow over rows of scimitar teeth. The wyvern lumbers into the light, moonshine glinting off the thick plates that hold together the orange shawl draped around the dragon. Ah, what a stroke of luck.

“Zagros,” Khalid coos, bowing his head in acknowledgment. The wyvern chuffs at him but refuses to hide his teeth. Khalid hasn’t seen the old beast in a year. If not summoned for active service, the wyvern will fly deep into the desert and disappear for months. It did not allow for any sort of affective bond to form between him and the prickly beast, but it left him with some weaknesses he can exploit.

The sentry’s snarl deepens as Khalid’s hand disappears in his inner pocket. He stretches his other hand with his fingers splayed for the wyvern to examine while he fishes for his weapon of choice.

“Zagros,” he coos again, presenting the dragon with a strip of dried fish. “Look what I have for you, Zagros.”

The wyvern’s aggressive posture does not relax, but he turns a suspicious eye on the offering. He lowers his head to inspect Khalid’s hands, sending hot puffs of breath that ruffle his scarf, freeing the fabric from its weak knot and sending it partially tumbling down his back. With a gentleness that is surprising from such a terrifying animal, Zagros grabs the dried fish between his teeth and slinks back into the shadows. Khalid allows a relieved sigh to escape him before reassuming his mission. With the sentry adequately pacified, the second stage of his plan can commence: find the matriarch and convince her not to murder him on the spot.

Dozens of shades of yellow and orange watch his trajectory from just outside the moonlit hall. No other sentry challenges his presence which, while mildly concerning, it’s not worth complaining about if it makes the scheme easier. Ducking into the stall where the matriarch uses to nest does elicit a few warning growls, but the cadence of the rumbles is hesitant at best, almost as if the flock as a whole isn’t entirely dedicated to chasing off the intruder. Standing inside his destination, Khalid can understand why.

The matriarch lays curled on the highest perch of the stall, her eyes barely flicking to acknowledge his presence. She is laying so that her back faces the room in a clear sign of dismissal. There is none of the maternal fury that Khalid was expecting, and that throws him for a loop for the few seconds that it took him to find the hatchling. Or rather, the lack of it.

There is a hint of discarded shells amongst the remains of the matriarch’s nest. The color is a vibrant, healthy blue, easily distinguishable even from the entryway. What is troubling is the trail of blood that stains the corners of the structure.

Khalid curses under his breath, ducking out of the stall. Had it been born sick? It is extremely rare for the mothers to eat the hatchlings even when they were born with crippling diseases, but it is not unheard of. Only happened in the wild; had never ocurred within the royal flock. Just his luck. It just had to be that the first time in all recorded history that a matriarch destroys her own nest is when he desperately needs to bond with a wyvern. This would be a major setback in his plans. It didn’t really leave him with _that_ many options on the table, but he could still pull it off. Gaining the respect of his people would be so much more difficult without a claimed wyvern but that didn’t mean that it was a completely impossible achievement–

He stops his retreat and listens. The wyverns around him huff in distress. Some make to leave their roosting spots only to be brought back by the furious bites of the older beasts. The flock is evidently concerned, and the confusion at the instinctual feeling brings out the aggressiveness in them. They sporadically emit low hooting calls – the common soothing sound for hatchlings.

Khalid turns sharply on his heel and goes back into the stalls. He leaves behind the one occupied by the matriarch and inspects the ones with the higher amount of bundled hay. It is on the third stall that he finally finds it. Hidden by moved bedding, likely from a frantic escape, droplets of blood mark a trail on the stone floor. Khalid slips inside the stall quietly, clicking low in his mouth. An answering click makes his heartbeat race, and his eyes fly to the corner of the room. A reddened snout pushes its way out of the bedding, quickly followed by a reptilian face softened by baby fat. Huge amber eyes blink up at him in suspicion amongst a constellation of tender white scales. The white wyvern hatchling shrieks, showing off a row of tiny, needle-sharp teeth. From outside, an answering chorus of hooting cries pierce the night.

“She rejected you, didn’t she? A white wonder,” he muses. The hatchling doesn’t seem to trust him in the slightest. It hisses when Khalid inches closer, pupils slitting until the amber nearly drowns them, batting wings that are still damp from the egg and sending hay flying in tiny hurricanes around the room. Its left shoulder shines crimson with the vague shape of a bitemark. A branded hatchling. The matriarch must have gotten spooked by the white hide. This is not an ideal situation, no matter how he sees it. The court will undoubtedly make a connection between his parentage and the abnormality in the matriarch’s clutch. Failing to tame this wyvern will do his position more harm than not having one at all.

The white creature keeps up a continuous snarl, surprisingly willy for a creature less than a day old. Its eyes burn with a stubbornness that feels bizarrely familiar. Khalid tilts his head, considering the cat-sized dragon, and it mimics his movement.

He remembers the stories of the white wyverns. Nader loves to scare the rookies with endless accounts of the moon-scaled beasts of the desert. A bite like no other, a rage incomparable, a speed like lightning raining from the heavens. His stories come from the folktales of old, legends that claim that the fury of the land flows in the blood of the starry beasts.

_Untamable_ , the Almyrans pass down to their children. _The white ones are cursed to be feral._

_“But if it were me riding on the back of the incontrollable sons of the desert–”_ Khalid unfurls his scarf under the wary vigilance of the wyvern. _“–what would that say about my legitimacy? How could the people possibly refuse my right if I have the moon under my command?”_

He unfolds the cloth until it gains enough width to form a net. The wyvern screeches in warning.

Green eyes meet blazing amber. “I’m very sorry about this.”

\--

He presents himself to his father at the break of dawn. The whispers rise unsubtle as the court catches sight of the clumsily wrapped bandages on his arms, blood leaking through in the shape of small bitemarks. His father remains impassive, extending a hand to accept the gleaming pearlescent scale from Khalid’s trembling fingers.

The King of Almyra holds onto the token for a moment too long, eyes lingering on the bowed shape of the crown prince, and then he returns the scale back to him.

Khalid feels a weight he wasn’t even aware he had drain out of him even as the whispering rises up to become an insistent clamoring of outraged protests. _Hopeless_. The contempt in their gazes at his legitimate claim on the wyvern will achieved nothing against his father’s decision. The grapevine will be a flaring inferno for the weeks to come as soon as they realize that there’s nothing that could abolish the validity of his choice.

He’s finally on the right track.

* * *

Khalid is standing on the open field that leads to the Roost. The winds have just changed to flow out towards the desert, the new gales sweeping the palace grounds mercilessly. The cleaning staff complain endlessly about the hardships of maintaining immaculate halls during the windy season which in turn rises the tension of the whole palace staff whenever they get roped into cleaning duty which then leads to the higher nobles (in other words, his cousins) not being able to do any of their normal activities until the wind dies down and that translates into a sharp increase on the hostile confrontations he has with his family. When they get like this, twitchy and frustrated like a falcon cooped in a cage for far too long, they turn downright vicious in their abuse. He swallows down most of the venom coating his words during those arguments, but he can only take so many fights in a day until he snaps.

Hence, he flees to the Roost.

“They all look at us and see nothing beyond our skin, huh girl?” The wyvern narrows her jewel eyes at him and chuffs in disinterest. Tough crowd.

The matriarch had moved on the day before. Khalid had gone out into the field to watch the great bronze beast stretch her wings out towards the morning sky. Her scales had looked dry and cracked as an aftereffect of the laying process. She had looked on towards the distant mountains with such a fierce longing in her yellow eyes that his heart had ached in sympathy. It had not taken long for the adults of the flock to join her, covering the field with the restless flutter of wings, every wyvern stretching their muscles in preparation of a long flight. The flock tends to stay until the matriarch’s hatchlings learn to fly, but the abnormalities in the birth had pushed the old female to guide her group back into the wilds. It’s brutal, as nature tends to be, the true spirit of the unforgiving land Khalid will rule over one day.

Still, it’s painful to be cast aside.

Something makes his ribcage rattle. Khalid looks back towards the white wyvern, who surveys the distant mountains like a statue. It takes a long time, but she curls her lips to let out the same rumbling cry that he can feel more than listen to. The bitemark on her shoulder gleams bright with blood once more, a mirror image of that night two months ago. It’s been less than a day since the matriarch left, yet all that Khalid sees is denial in the youngling’s posture.

_He had seen the horror in the youngling’s eyes when the matriarch once more refused its touch, darting forward to sink her scimitar fangs into the white scarred shoulder amongst the jeering howls of the wyvern flock, pinning her offspring into the dust with a snarl of fury that echoed painfully in his ears._

_She had roared with the ferocity of the desert in her piercing voice and declared her offspring unworthy of its wings._

_Is it anger what swims in the amber eyes of his claimed wyvern? Is it fear? Is it disgust at its mother for casting it out once more, abandoning it for the flock and the promise of the wildlands beyond? Is it at the cruel, endless desert that forsakes its own creatures? Or is it at itself, for bearing a flag of the moon in its skin?_

“She’s still not warming up to you?”

The wyvern growls and bounds away, slinking off towards the shadows of the pines. Khalid watches her go, leaving Nader to hop on the wall beside him. He hums nonchalantly at the general’s question and swings his legs until his heels bounce lightly against the rock.

Nader crosses his arms and follows the retreating wyvern’s path. “You knew this was going to be difficult, kiddo. The matriarch was never going to accept her into the flock, never mind teach her the ways of the wind. A white wyvern is not a welcome addition to any roost.”

“I think I still held the hope of time easing most of the matriarch’s reservations,” he admits with a sigh. “Do you think the subadults will teach her? They don’t seem to be as aggressive towards her.”

“Eh, don’t count on it.” Khalid shoots him a glare, to which Nader laughs bitterly. “I don’t want to get your hopes up, kiddo. The younglings might not be as vocal as the adults, but they won’t have anything to do with her unless your lady impresses them first.”

“And if she doesn’t learn to fly, they’ll turn on her,” Nader says in a somber tone. “A stranded wyvern is a dead wyvern.”

They look towards the farthest end of the wyvern field, where the younger wyverns, those who won’t leave with the matriarch until they reach their full size, twirl in lazy circles and chase each other across the sky. From her spot under the swaying trees, the white dragon stares at them in what appears to be intense concentration.

Khalid takes her in from a distance. “You think I should forfeit the claim?”

Nader’s lips curl down into a grimace, a complex emotion darkening his eyes. “That would do you more harm than good. Those vipers back at the council chambers would love the opportunity to strike you down decisively. It’s only been two months since your little stunt and she still has a lot of time to grow before she has to face the flock. Be patient is my advice.”

“It would be easier to be patient if she showed any indicators that she’ll accept me as a rider. She would rather starve to dead than allow me to feed her.”

That gets a laugh out of Nader and a hearty slap to his back that almost sends him tumbling off the wall. The general turns to him, amusement clear on his scarred face. “Whoever told you that getting the scale was the difficult part? Haven’t I told you how I tamed Zagros?”

“You bribed him with fish,” drawls Khalid. “You always tell that story during drills.”

“Heh, that’s not all there is to it.” Nader drops down from his perch, walking towards the outer door of the Roost. Khalid follows him inside at a slower pace. “Zagros was the firstborn of his clutch. The meanest beast you’ll ever see; he’d chase off the staff when he was barely bigger than a mutt. There was much contest for him, but everyone failed to expose his underjaw and he quickly earned a reputation of being untamable.”

Nader pushes open the main doors, holding them to allow Khalid passage back into the main castle grounds.

“That was the problem, see? No one bothered to know him before trying their hand at bonding with him.” Nader puts a hand between his shoulder blades and moves him along towards the training grounds. Khalid groans in resignation. How did he not see the obvious bait? Of course Nader would turn this into even more fighting lessons. 

“When it was my turn, I spend hours just looking at him boss around his nestmates. He was a brute of a beast, yes, but he usually backed off if the older wyverns snapped back at him. The next day I went right up to him, ignored all of the oversized pigeon posturing he had going on, grabbed him by the horns and yelled in his face. I honestly thought that that was it for me, I was going to get mauled with my stupid plan. Zagros just looked at me dead in the eyes for the longest time and then he crooned. Beast taller than a warhorse sang like a damn nightingale and allowed me to scratch his underjaw. The ones that had failed called it a ridiculous ploy but between them and me, who got to name the untamable wyvern? Just reminding them of that shut them up in no time.”

Nader picks up a training axe, giving it an experimental swing. “What I’m saying is, give yourself time to know your lady. She’s a wild one, that’s for certain, but there must be something unique that will earn you her respect. She has a fire in her eyes that’s too sharp to go down easily; only time will tell if she makes the flock listen to her.”

“Something unique, huh?” Khalid grabs an axe himself and busies himself with examining the blade for dents. “If it gives me a valid excuse not to be in the palace during the day, wyvern watching doesn’t sound so bad.”

“See? There’s always an alternative, isn’t that what you always say, kiddo?” He widens his stance into a fighting pose. “Treat this as one of your little schemes. Just try not to get bit, ay?”

* * *

He sees her out in the field every morning and it breaks his heart a little bit.

She stands, still and silent and statuesque, eyes focused on a distant point somewhere beyond the mountains. She holds this constant vigil for a flock that won’t come back for her. Her instincts must be a continuous warning cry of _wrong, wrong, wrong_ every time her amber eyes get lost in the horizon. Khalid wishes he could make her understand that she’s on her own, but as harsh as it is, this is a lesson that she must learn by herself.

He dares step into her vicinity until she hisses a warning, and then he takes one more step just to tease her. She evidently does not find it as amusing as he thinks it is. A stuttering growl forewarns an attack just as he dodges to the side. A white muzzle goes lunging past, the wyvern quickly turning back to hiss angrily. She’s not as imposing as the subadults are, what with her gangly limbs and smooth hide. She barely comes up to his hip, so he doubts even the dogs would be terribly intimidated by her posturing. Then again, those fangs are really starting to grow into her mouth as of late. What were tiny fish fangs are starting to reach their maximum size, soon to fall off to make way for her future dagger teeth.

_“Way too skinny for her age”_ , he thinks as he swirls away from her second mauling attempt. She shrieks in frustration and bounds after him like a stranded bat. _“Is she still not eating what I leave for her?”_

He laughs as she gets a new snoutful of dirt. Her pristine scales are dusted from their chase and he knows that he’s toeing a dangerous line between outright rejection and grudging respect. He hops on the fence and is just slow enough for her to get his calf. The bite stings something fierce after he forces her jaws open. The wyvern thrills in mockery before sitting down to observe his assessment of the wound.

“Those teeth of yours are savage,” Khalid grimaces as he pokes the reddened skin. It doesn’t look too bad, as far as bites go. It’ll probably scar, unfortunately.

She chirps, as if to assert her winning of this chase. He wrinkles his nose at her, and the wyvern almost falls over in shocked outrage.

“Don’t tell me no one’s ever treated you with anything but fear before.” She yips and snaps her jaw on empty air. Probably the beginning of a tantrum, if he’s reading her lashing tail correctly. Khalid digs around his pockets and his fingers catch upon the meat he swindled from the kitchen staff. 

“I got you something.” She looks at him distrustfully but sniffs the air when he pulls the meat into view. He throws it at her, and she doesn’t snap it from midflight like he expects. The slice falls flat on her nose with a wet splat. She shrieks in response, shaking off the offending piece and baring all her teeth at it. Satisfied that it won’t rise up to attack her again, she reaches down and gulps it in a single bite.

And then turns back and growls disapprovingly at him.

“What?” He huffs as he digs for the second slice. “You won’t eat the food I leave for you in the stalls so I figured I might give hand-feeding a try.”

More snarling towards the second slice, but she dodges when he throws it at her. Good, she’s a fast learner. “See? It works. I really can’t believe that you wanted to be coddled.”

Another growl. He throws her two slices that she’s too slow to avoid.

“I mean, I get that you’re a baby. But given everything that’s happened to you so far, why would you starve yourself until someone came to pamper you?”

The wyvern blinks up at him with her huge eyes. There’s no snarling this time. Instead, she pins him with her unnerving gaze until he remembers to throw her more meat.

“Do you really crave attention so much?”

She looks up from her chewing and huffs, looking unimpressed.

“I really don’t get you,” he says as he throws her a bigger slice. She watches it arc towards the ground and intercepts it before it hits. “You’re too naïve. You don’t seem to understand the world around you just yet. You have to get so much stronger if you are going to survive in this kingdom.”

The wyvern gobbles down the piece and chirps for more.

“Your flock showed you the kind of world you live in, isn’t that enough to make you see?”

She shrieks at him but he’s too busy mussing to dig around for more meat. “Take it from me, who has been an outcast for all of his life: if you do not outsmart them, they’ll crush you without a hint of pity.”

His vision is suddenly full of white scales. He goes very still as she shoves her nose inside his pockets, ripping at them with her teeth until the meat all tumbles down into the ground. She perches next to him for a second, flickers her contemptuous gaze back at him and growls low on her throat.

_How about it?_

“I see you got the hang of jumping,” he chuckles even as his heart beats wildly. She snorts and jumps down towards her prize.

* * *

He wakes up one morning to the shrieking roars of young wyverns. He throws on the first thing that passes as acceptable clothing and rushes towards the open field. There’s a crowd forming at the walls of the field, mostly guards and the occasional nervous kitchen staff, all of them whispering and pointing past the pine trees. When Khalid peers past the wall, he meets gleaming amber eyes just as she throws back her head and roars. She’s resplendent at her five months of age, her hide still smooth with hatchling scales even as her size keeps doubling with the passing weeks. She’s bigger now than she would normally be at her age, almost as if she’s forced herself to grow through sheer willpower. It pays off in the way she’s pinning the oldest juvenile of the group between her claws like he’s nothing more than a lizard compared to her might.

The flock thrills at her and this time, their trumpeting cries are high and clear, the welcoming notes amongst wyverns of equal status.

Khalid smiles and holds her far too clever eyes until she breaks the stare and goes to join her kin. A wild one indeed.

* * *

She snarls as soon as she detects his scent. It’s expected, she rages against anyone who would dare encroach her space, but he likes to think that she’s less wrathful towards his presence than she was during her first few months. The warmer years have been kind to her — she has almost reached her adult size, shoulders now passing the tallest of the royal horses. The smoothness of her infant skin shows signs of the harsher angles she will grow into, and the snubbed horns are gaining a wicked curve reminiscent of her mother. She looks less innocent and more like the sacred beast of Almyra, more like the moonlit wraiths of the deep desert. She truly is a sight for sore eyes even with the angry scowl marking her fair face.  
  
Khalid thinks all of this despite the wild pounding in his head. His fingers curl desperately amongst the folds of his sash as he fights to keep them from spasming, knuckles turning white as his desperation wins out. His legs feel impossibly heavy, as if he’s crossing a river wearing iron boots or stumbling through loose sand. He’s not sure how he made it to the Roost, how many guards he had to hide from lest they be accomplices on the lookout, counting down the seconds as he crouched in the shadows with only the erratic beating of his heart for a companion, watching how his time runs out drop by drop the longer he waited for them to move on.  
  
He knows this poison, had seen the scattered powder seconds after he dropped the fork, but it had been too late to do anything other than downing the antitoxin and hoping for the best. It’s a laughably sloppy job, clearly the result of terrible planning and even more abysmal execution, but it might be what finally takes him out.

_“What a stupid way to go.”_ His mind feels hazy, as if his head is stuffed full of cotton. His eyelids drop over his eyes with insistence _. “When have I ever been this careless?”  
  
_The wyvern lumbers over, wings half oustretched in a clear warning display. Her lips curl back to bare long fangs as a shrill, angry hiss rolls off of her tongue. She stops just out of his reach when he fails to concede the space she so clearly demands, body language tensing up, betraying her sudden unease. Her head cocks to the side, a clear amber eye gazing at him suspiciously as she tastes the air with her tongue. She sneezes with a grimace, lowering her head to peer at his unfocused eyes. Khalid has but a few seconds to contemplate this new development before his feet give out from under him.   
  
Damn that fast-acting poison.   
  
He barely reacts when a gust of breath puffs against the back of his neck, completely dislodging the headscarf that had been slipping from his head during the breakneck race to the Roost. He feels more than hears the rumbling growl and the cold touch of fangs gracing his skin. 

He slips in and out of focus, but he remembers the ghost of her breath ruffling his hair.  
  
There is a sudden roar, loud and guttural, like the crashing of thunder during a storm. It is much too jarring to his charred nerves, and it makes him bite his tongue to keep the whine from escaping. Some primal part of him clamors to get back on his feet and run to safety, as far away from the predator as humanly possible. He thinks he curls in on himself due to the agony he feels when his nerves are set on fire.

A commotion explodes around him. Someone screams and the juvenile flock howls and then he feels how all of the muscles in his body relax at once and he slips away into a dreamless sleep.

\---  
  


He awakens much later to the sun on his face, and his hands fly up to cover his sensitive eyes from the harsh glare. He’s still too out of it to react to the second presence in the room but he tenses when he registers the sudden dip on the bed. He forces his jackhammering pulse back into a semblance of calm when he meets emerald eyes like his own. Tiana von Riegan passes him a glass of water and watches him like a hawk until he finishes it.

“You gave us a scare back there,” her tone isn’t accusing, but the way her eyes look guarded demand an explanation.

He grimaces at the sour taste in his tongue, probably a side effect of the toxin. “Someone bribed the tasters. Or maybe they got an agent in the guard. Either way, it was a mistake. It won’t happen again.”

Her lips press together in a stern line. She takes the glass from his hands and forces him to look at her.

Ah, and he thought the wyvern was challenging.

“Mistakes like this can’t ever happen,” she says mildly, as if she’s making pleasant conversation with the merchants. “You can’t allow our enemies to smell weakness. You would be dead if you hadn’t lucked out with the antitoxin.”

“I know mom,” he sighs and buries his face in his hands. “It was an oversight on my part. I should have been more careful.”

A beat of silence.

Arms encircle him and he’s tucked under her chin. It’s uncharacteristic of the Queen of Almyra to show her maternal side now that he’s older; it must be quite a scare that he gave her. Her grip is bordering on painful and the shaky inhale betrays the fear she’s carefully tucking behind a mask. “Don’t scare me like that again, Khalid.”

His voice is muffled against her collar. “You know that’s out of our control.”

She gives him one last squeeze and lets him go. “Still, a mother can wish.”

The smile they share is equal parts tired and resigned. Khalid throws off the covers and stands on his feet, wobbling slightly as his muscles protest the movement. His mother offers her arm and he leans on it gratefully.

Tiana makes a thoughtful noise as she leads them towards the balcony. “I must admit, I’m not entirely certain as to why you chose to hide out in the Roost.”

Khalid sinks into the first cushion in his path. Getting poisoned zaps his energy like nothing else can. “It was more likely that they had sentries posted somewhere near Nader’s quarters. I couldn’t take the risk of stumbling right into an ambush.”

“So, you chose the furious wyvern over the assassins.”

At that, Khalid lets out a sharp bark of laughter. “She’s more honest than the whole court put together. I took a gamble and it worked out.”

“You trusted she wouldn’t attack you on sight like she does everyone else.” There’s something like realization in her emerald eyes, but Khalid can’t, for the life of him, make heads or tails as to what she’s pondering.

“Trust,” he mumbles. “Is that what it was?”

Tiana leaves his side and comes back with a brush. She passes it over the sweaty mess that is his hair and fights with the knots.

“I think it was the best option,” she hums. “You did not know it, but you were being followed when you blacked out in the Roost.”

“Followed? Do you know who-”

“It’s impossible to know who it was.” She pauses on her ministrations to squeeze his shoulder. “There is not much she left untouched.”

Khalid’s mind pounces on that scrap of information. “I see.”

Wrapping his head scarf back into place, Tiana starts working on his ruined braid. “I think you’re both too stubborn for your own good. It took a lot of convincing before that wyvern allowed us to retrieve you. It surprises me that she hasn’t accepted you before this day; her protective fury was a sight to behold.”

His mother ties the end of the braid with a gold bead and places a tender hand on his cheek.

“You’ve been striving for her approval for three years now. If she wasn’t even slightly amendable to the idea, she would have chased you off a long time ago. I think the only thing keeping her away is yourself.”

She smiles at him, and in her eyes, he sees the same burning fire of molten amber gemstones. “What is this fear that holds you back?”

Khalid sighs and stares out towards the balcony.

“Well,” says Tiana with a hint of mischief in her voice. “If you won’t act on your claim, I have half a mind to do so myself.”

“You don’t need another wyvern; you have yours and Father’s,” he says with a laugh.

“I can only touch your Father’s wyvern because I’m married to the man,” she points out. “Having a second wyvern that I claimed by myself? That would be very impressive, wouldn’t it?”

“Fine, fine.”

“Think of the _possibilities_.”

“Alright, I get your point.”

“Prove all those traditions wrong–”

“ _Mom_.”

\---

He recovers slowly, or at least that’s the official story. He stays out of public sight until the perpetrators are caught. Turns out some of his uncles prefer a more direct approach at claiming a spot in the line for the throne. Khalid spends the weeks following the poisoning incidents cooped up in his rooms or stuck with Nader as a babysitter. It’s not the greatest arrangement, but one look from his mother had him shutting up and begrudgingly accepting those conditions.

As soon as tensions have calmed down enough to settle metaphorical hackles, Khalid slips away to the Roost. He knows that Nader noticed his stealth attempt, but he must deem it important enough to let him go.

The youngling flock is halved from what it was at the beginning of the year. The older subadults had achieved the full size and maturity required to catch up to the matriarch. Still, the grounded flock of juveniles doze off in the Roost after their last flight. Khalid ducks past stalls filled with lethargic wyverns before giving up and heading out towards the open field. The afternoon sun bathes the plains with a warm glow that makes the colors blend in orange hues. The temperature is starting to plummet as the sun descends in the horizon, bringing with it a chilly gale from the distant mountains. It’s quiet out here when the wyverns have returned to their nests and he thinks that’s why she’s waiting in the field. She is laying down beneath the pines, wings outstretched to soak up the residual heat, head tilted towards the sun. He can see the sunrays dancing over her white hide, painting her in a shower of gold and flickering fire. A gemstone eye opens to acknowledge his presence, but she makes no indication of wanting to move out of her spot.

He sits down at the edge of the trees and watches her close her eye and resume her sunbathing. She looks uncharacteristically peaceful, such a far cry from the usual vigilance that she normally presents. He understands then that none of his cousins would have ever gotten the slightest of chances at impressing her. She’s so intrinsically Almyran and yet she’s something… more. Her aggression is not directed by instinct, it never has; it’s a conscious choice she makes that derivates from her personality. These games she plays are always constructed to the guidelines of her own rules and her own wants. No wonder she took over the juvenile flock; none of them stood a chance.

Perhaps this is the truth behind the myth of the white wyverns – they are not simple mounts like their kin; there’s an intrinsic complexity that’s woven together with an intelligence far beyond what they give them credit for.

She makes him wait until the sun slips away behind the horizon. Only then does she turn her head and regards him with guarded eyes.

“You saved me,” he tells her beneath the darkening sky. “You had no obligation to do so but you saved me.”

How odd a thing, to have your life balanced in the grip of another.

She blinks and tilts her head.

Khalid smiles at her and bows his head as respectfully as he can given his current sitting position. “I owe you my life, and I don’t take such debts lightly. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.”

The snowy beast makes a deep, humming growl that rattles Khalid’s ribcage. She stands up tall on her ivory legs, sinuous neck curved in the proud arc she very rarely adopts when there is an audience to admire it. She looks at him with her head facing forward, her serpentine gaze brimming with a focused intensity that has never been there before. It feels like a challenge, like the ceremonial battle of wills that he has read about obsessively in his youth. She makes no move to break away and neither does he. He feels the way those jewel eyes take him in, how the size him up and weight the value of being bound to this rider.

He feels a thrill, a spark of childish joy when she chuffs and drops her heavy head over his shoulder.

“Always in your own terms,” he laughs, pressing a hand over her jawline. She hums as if to agree with him and tilts her head up to expose her throat, and his fingers ghost over the tender white scales. The dragon clicks and relaxes under his touch.

“We’ll take them all by storm,” he whispers to her purring growls. “There’ll be songs written in our names. This kingdom will bow down to our shadows. And beyond the border, well, our story won’t be contained by the desert.”

He sees the darkness extend over the palace grounds and for once he’s not afraid of it. The night hides the glint of crooked smiles, of bloodied fists and curved daggers, but he’s got the fierce desert wind on his side, the feral star. His enemies are plenty and, come morning, a new war will brew in the higher echelons of the capital. A war that marks the first movement of a pawn across the board.

She peers up at him sharply, and her fire burns with a wild sort of determination. He smiles and pats the skin behind her horns.

“You just wait and see, sweet moonlight. I have schemes way beyond your wildest dreams.”

\---

“Did falling unconscious in the Roost really endear me to you?”

She warbles in response, nudging his stomach with her snout. She’s gentle in her nuzzling, careful in a way he’s never seen in all the years studying her. Who would have thought that the snow-clad nightmare could be such a softhearted creature behind those razor teeth?

“A show of trust, huh?” The word feels foreign on his tongue, much like his future beyond the desert is uncertain, hanging on the edge of the precipice that widens with every uncertain variable that risks his plan. He takes pride in the flawless nature of his schemes, on how smoothly they play out, as if he’s doing nothing more than arranging pieces over a board. The Almyran court are dangerous water to thread through, and that fuels the thrill of the challenge. He has had all of his life to understand the everchanging currents of power in the palace and adapt accordingly. It’s always dangerous to set a plan in motion in a place where he’s so targeted, but he has a myriad of contingency plans should his enemies come after him.

This uncertainty, though. This is not something he feels prepared for. With only a year to build up a network from the ground up, this scheme is more a suicide mission than a solid plan. He knows nothing more than the language of the land and the frail blood claim that he possesses. Khalid needs to shed every single layer of himself that marks him Almyran and reinvent his very being. Not a trace of his accent can remain, not a hint of the skills he’s being taught since his childhood. He can’t allow anyone to find the crown prince. From what he knows of Fódlan, they don’t take well to intruders.

“What is the price of my ambition?” His fingers trace the outline of protruding spines. He has always known that he is to abandon his homeland if he is to reach his goals but beyond that? He’s as prepared as he can be. The pawns have already moved across the board, the pieces are in place for his next move, and yet he can’t quite appease the insidious whisper that has taken ahold of his heart. Whatever can he expect, if this plays out the way he wants?

A life of secrets is what he knows, the puppeteer twisting between the vipers. When he thinks of the future, he thinks of the desert, the eternal desert, where he’s standing alone under the darkening skies. He thinks of whispering dreams that slip through his fingers like sand. He sees himself gazing at the distant stars, reaching out towards the pinpricks of light watching over his days and nights and wonders, is this all there is?

She butts her head against his shoulder and thrills in concern. Khalid smiles and pats her nose. “Just lost in thought. How about we think of a name for you? How does that sound?”

She chirps in what he supposes is agreement, and then proceeds to turn down all of his suggestions until dawn peeks once more beyond the mountains.

* * *

Fódlan brings with it so many more things that a simple name change. It’s a constant battle of wills unlike anything Claude has ever seen. His subtle machinations have a higher degree of success in these noble courts, but the danger is very present, if not as evident. Fódlani nobles are cowards and actors, smiling pleasantly in the roundtable while backstabbing their allies for the sake of more power. At least the Almyrans were honest in their avarice.

He learns this game of making and breaking alliances quick enough, and he soon can make decisions of his own without feeling the need to pass them on to Judith first. It’s a game of balance: how much he’s willing to give these bloodthirsty vultures in exchange for their unknowing help in his larger plan.

He allows himself the occasional night to stargaze from his room in the Riegan State and just exist. He misses Almyra with a passion that astonishes him. It was a terrible place, a dangerous, soul-crushing place, but he left a part of him back there, and the ghosts of his childhood weight heavily on his mind.

He misses his wyvern dearly. Of course, he couldn’t bring her along. Furthermore, he’s glad he had the foresight not to take her in this journey. Her pearlescent scales would give away her origin and Count Gloucester does not need that kind of information on his hands.

Claude is used to being alone, to rely only on himself and his wits to keep him alive, to be a schemer and a performer first and foremost, but he can’t help but wonder if that’s all he’ll ever be.

He dreams of a world with no barriers. He endeavors to build a community that won’t besmirch based on a place of birth, won’t do as the matriarch did and cast out her children for the color of their skin. A place where no child would be reduced to hiding like a rat to survive. A place where the desert melts away like a long-forgotten nightmare.

He holds on to his lofty dreams and ideals through the whole year at Garreg Mach. He keeps them tied to his heart as he meets the Golden Deer and grows close to them in a way that Khalid the Crown Prince could have never done. He wraps himself in charming smiles and misdirection in the wolves’ den that is the Academy and finds himself both a mystery and an unknown variable in the Professor that picks his class. He keeps them close until his guard melts away with tea and genuine care and he wonders why he chose to walk this path in the sidelines. Wasn’t he striving for creating bonds of solidarity between continents? Isn’t he going against what he truly thinks can change this rotten country?

Sometimes, he thinks he never really left the land of the golden dunes. He feels like he’ll wake up someday with the scorching sun at his back and a dagger at his throat, faceless shadows crowing at him for abandoning his pride to join the Fódlani mongrels like they always thought he would.

Sometimes, he thinks he doesn’t know who he is anymore.

\---

Claude climbs down from the saddle, carting a hand through his wind-ruffled hair and getting his fingers stuck on the myriad of new knots that are going to be such a pain to get rid of. His hands find the decadent remains of his braid and he sighs internally, resigning himself to the pain of having to braid it yet again. Twice in the same day. Sure, he shouldn’t had snuck up on Lysithea like that, but how was he supposed to know that the girl was going to throw a spell in instinctual defense? She was getting _vicious_ with all the extra training.

“Oh, you’ve finished early.”

Byleth walks closer with what the Deer have lovingly nicknamed _Torture List Journal_. It’s Friday, unofficially known as Chore Day, and Teach likes to write down all the pending tortures of the day in her little bound book.

“Guess wyverns just like me,” he grins and pats the snout of his mount. It purrs, leaning into the touch like the cats that stalk the Monastery grounds. It’s strange, these tame dragons. It fits in with Fódlan’s general closemindedness that even the mounts must be perfectly mellow at all times, but there’s something intrinsically wrong with the meekness of the wyverns. All of them passive, dulled-eyed creatures, no different from the sheep that graze peacefully in the farmlands of the Alliance. Claude feels sick every time he has to work with one.

Byleth gives the landing zone a cursory view. “Where’s Hilda?”

“Oh, you know Hilda, Teach.” He throws an arm over her shoulders and nonchalantly leans on her, tone turning conspirational. “Left for the infirmary a little past the middle of the shift but she showed up. That’s a lot, isn’t it? I’d say you’ve inspired dear old Hilda to actually make an effort, for once.”

Hilda will have some strong opinions about his way of interpreting ‘Claude _please_ , I promised Marianne I would take her out to town, come up with something’ but oh well.

Byleth raises an eyebrow, seeming entirely unimpressed and just the slightest bit skeptical. She shakes her head and opens the little torture book, and Claude can spy how she marks them both as completed. Such a soft heart, his Teach.

“I take it her wyvern is still saddled?”

She evidently isn’t looking for confirmation of something she already knows, so he grabs the reins of his wyvern and follows the Professor in her resolute march towards the pens. By the time he’s convinced the dragon to duck under the archway, she’s already working on Hilda’s forgotten mount. Claude musters one of his most irreverent smiles, mind already working overtime to strategize a way of getting an outburst of emotion out of his beloved professor now that he’s got her alone, rare as it may be, but feels himself freeze in place, all plans screeching to a halt.

There’s nothing out of the ordinary on taking the equipment off of a wyvern. He’s sure all of the Golden Deer are somewhat efficient on preparing a mount under pressure, never mind inside the relative safety of the stone walls of the Monastery. When routing bandits, one must be prepared to fight at any moment or risk being overwhelmed. Here, inside the poor imitation of a wyvern roost, the activity should be mundane and easily overlooked. He doesn’t quite understand, then, why he feels like he’s dropped off of his white fury in midflight, falling under the blazing Almyran sun. Why the sudden stuttering of his heart grips his very soul with a terror he’s never felt before, whispering outrageous ideas that shouldn’t have a place in his plan.

Byleth pats the dragon on the snout, a faint impression of what could be a smile curling the very ends of her lips, and he has to wonder when did his wary surveillance turn into an ever-present need to understand this perplexing mercenary. Claude can’t pinpoint the exact moment when he stopped actively trying to swipe glimmers of information out of her every time they met up for tea. Why did he ever go from scurrying through the academy on the hunt for secrets behind her back to relying on her staunch support to uncover the hidden mysteries hoarded by the Church for so long.

Claude smells danger the more he stares. These feelings, these budding seeds of trust, will put his careful machinations in jeopardy. He needs to backtrack, cover up his scent, paint over the peeling mask he put together since he went by another name, fighting tooth and nail in the heart of the desert for the right to live another day. Go back to when it was only him and a daughter of the storm, back to when they were the only ones chasing constellations at dusk.

And yet.

_“I wonder, if I told you my dreams, would you help me reach for the stars?”_

* * *

He holds on to those daydreams of his through the war to keep him going when he thinks to throw away everything and flee back home, back into the cold embrace of the desert kingdom, back to clinging to the fluctuating power that his mother holds, back to the refuge of the Almyran skies and the moonlit creature that guards him with her life. He perseveres for the memory of a subtle smile, for the warmth of shared meals in the dining hall, for the knowledge that he alone can make sure his friends survive to see a new sunrise every day.

Claude adds more factors to his grand scheme as he pleads to the constellations to guide him once more.

* * *

“Boy!”

Claude barely stops his smile from slipping into a grimace. Of all the times to run into Judith, it just had to be when he really wants to see no one. He can’t allow his frustration to show so clearly, so he composes his mask as he sighs and turns on his heel to grin up to her.

“Hey, wasn’t expecting to see you so soon. How are things holding up in the north?”

Judith gives him a smile of her own that’s much too sharp to be completely innocent. “Same old, stubborn bastards. You know how taxing it is to herd nobles.”

“I would say,” he drawls. “The Roundtable meeting is going to be prolonged, I’m sure. I understand their reluctance to formally join the war effort but if we could only agree on anything at all, we wouldn’t need to hole up in this State for much longer.”

She hums and crosses her arms. “You knew what you were getting into, boy.”

“I know, I know,” Claude sighs. There are several pending letters nagging at him. He could try to leave them for tomorrow, but he doubts the recipients will be much pleased by his tardiness.

Judith narrows her eyes, her smile sliding down into a reproachful scowl. “When was the last time you slept?”

“What is time, anyway?” He mutters. At her deepening frown, he tries to smile placidly. “Don’t worry about me. As soon as an agreement is achieved, everything will be so much easier.”

She’s not fooled, because the years have desensitized her to his words. “Do I need to sic that menacing woman you brought along on you?”

Claude grimaces and does his best to move the conversation along. “No need; I’ll go see her later. Teach and I have to go over the plan for tomorrow’s meeting, anyway.”

Judith stares him down right then and there in the middle of the hallway. At plain sight of the house staff, who hurry along while pretending not to see anything. He’s really not in the mood for this.

“Look.” He pinches the bridge of his nose and lets out a sharp sigh. “I know that I shouldn’t push myself so hard, but a lot depends on the outcome of this Roundtable, Judith. The stakes here are much more relevant than whether or not I manage to sleep well at night. I promise I won’t make a habit of this, alright?”

“Don’t make promises you have no intention of keeping,” she snarks. The tension bleeds out of her shoulders in what he’s learned is Judith’s version of reluctant conceding.

“By the way, Nardel was asking for you. I met him by the fields next to the training grounds.”

Now that’s unexpected. “Did he saw what it was about?”

“No idea,” she says, but the smirk begs to differ. “Said it was urgent.”

“Right.” He shoots her a disbelieving stare but she shrugs it off and excuses herself.

A long walk later, he’s marching up to Nardel, who casually sits on the fence marking the border of the open field. The man pats the space to his right, which is not at all forthcoming of any explanation for dragging him out here.

“You really used Judith as a messenger,” Claude drawls as he sits down. “That’s a cheap shot.”

Nardel lets out a rueful chuckle. “Got you here didn’t she?”

Claude shakes his head and resigns himself to his fate. “What was so important that it couldn’t wait until after I was finished with the nobles?”

Nardel grins, scanning the afternoon sky halfheartedly. “A letter arrived for you this morning. Falcon message.”

Official Almyran correspondence. The falcons were scantly used outside the borders of the kingdom if it didn’t involve some issue of extreme urgency. If that was meant to be reassuring, Claude wasn’t really feeling it all.

“Nardel, what has happened?” There hasn’t been an attempt on the throne, has it? This is the worst moment possible to be called back to the capital. If his family is facing a direct challenge, there’s very little he can do to weasel his way out of this one. Not returning would be enough leverage to hold over his parents and rally the generals to support the rite of combat. He would be forced to abandon the Fódlani war for an indeterminate amount of time, enough for whatever tentative agreement he reaches with the Alliance nobles to crumble and leave his army without the much-needed support.

Byleth will kill him for this one, he’s sure of it.

“Kiddo, it’s nothing alarming,” Nardel reassures him, likely recognizing his rising panic. “You just got a visitor incoming.”

That does manage to break him out of the mental loop he was stuck in. “Who–”

Her wings kick up strong gusts as she lands, ribbons of dust curling up and away from her talons. He jumps from the fence when she has barely had the time to trumpet a greeting and raises a hand to meet her in the middle of the field. Pearlescent scales glimmer brightly under the foreign sun, gemstone eyes burning with the fire he has missed so much.

“Sweet moonlight!” He laughs and she rumbles in kind. “What are you doing here?”

“They couldn’t keep her away forever.” Claude looks back at Nardel, who now leans against the outside face of the fence. “Seems that six years is the limit of her patience.”

She huffs and glares at Nardel as if blaming him for their years apart. Claude pats her cheek soothingly and she turns to inspect his hair.

“You can’t tame the storm out of a white wyvern, isn’t that what the legends tell?”

“Hah! You got it right, kiddo. Zagros was in a really bad mood after I send for him, so I’ll leave you to pacify your lady, eh?”

His wyvern nudges insistently at the side of his head, and he has to push her snout away lest she pokes one of his eyes out with her horns. “No braid, I know. A lot has happened since we last saw each other.”

She grumbles and sits down, tucking her wings underneath her in a more comfortable position. She’s changed too in these six years, the scales under his hands sharp and angular, rippling as she moves her neck to scan the premises. She doesn’t appear to be _too_ disgruntled about being left behind but, knowing the volatility of this particular wyvern, Claude doesn’t want to make a hasty assumption and believe everything’s forgiven.

“Have you been flying nonstop from the capital?” Her reptilian eye turns to look at him but quickly returns to watch the open sky above. He’ll take that as a yes.

“As soon as you’re rested, we’ll go for a flight,” he tells her as he looks over the new saddle. “Fódlan is a different kind of beast, but it’s nothing you can’t conquer.”

“Claude?”

Ah, so Judith lied.

With a low growl, the wyvern gets between him and Byleth, who looks at her with wide eyes, but appears to be more curious than intimidated. A white tail whips threateningly, leaving behind faint gouges on the ground. Byleth, either ignoring the danger or not realizing what’s happening, leaves the relative safety of the fenced gate and walks towards them.

His wyvern arches back her neck, hissing out a warning growl that gets deeper as Byleth never falters on her approach. Claude sees disaster in the glint of her dagger teeth.

“Uh, Teach? What are you doing?”

She doesn’t stop, eyes holding the wyvern’s in the steadfast manner that’s so uniquely hers. “I’m befriending her.”

“My friend, I’m sorry to have to break it to you but that’s a terrible idea.” He makes to physically stop her from walking towards certain doom but a short snap of teeth from the dragon keeps him right where he is. “Oh, really? You too? Hey, I can’t just let you take her fingers off!”

She grumbles at him but never takes her eyes off of Byleth. The woman comes to a stop just a step away from the wyvern. White scales ripple as the dragon stands up to her full height, arching her long neck to tower menacingly over Byleth. The hissing bleeds into a snarl, a deep, rumbling warning that kickstarts whatever instinctual part of his brain had gotten frozen up by the unprovoked flash of teeth.

“Darling, white moonlight,” he says cautiously in Almyran, praying Byleth is too focused on staring down his _half feral wyvern_ to comment on it. “Settle down, will you? Let’s settle down and go for a flight.”

There must be too much panic bleeding into his tone, for the wyvern’s attention briefly flickers to him, her warning dying down in intensity. She gazes at him with those molten eyes like she’s rummaging his heart, categorizing the ways in which he has changed. She clicks curiously as she turns back to Byleth, as if seeing her clearly for the first time. Her puffs of air ruffle mint green hair as she takes in her scent, nosing her forehead like she’s looking for something. She growls as she circles her, but her tone is more uncertain than aggressive. To her credit, Byleth stays still and allows her inspection.

And then almost gives Claude a heart attack when she reaches up to scratch the soft scales of her underjaw.

His wyvern pauses at the contact, muscles going tense as if to spring away. Byleth doesn’t know, there’s no way Byleth would know. Byleth doesn’t know the same way any of the Deer wouldn’t know. This is not Almyra, there’s nothing preventing anyone from petting warmounts, but he wishes there was a way to tell that to his wyvern.

She tilts her head to peer down at the offending hand, flicks her attention towards him, and then almost gives him his second heart attack of the day by leaning into the touch without an ounce of hesitation. _Okay, what the hell._

“Well, you never cease to amaze me, Teach,” Claude chuckles to hide his bewilderment. Both Byleth and the wyvern turn to look at him and the combined intensity of both their gazes is almost enough to send him running back to the State. _Get a grip of yourself, Claude._

“She’s nice,” says Byleth as her only explanation. The white wyvern makes a sound very much like a chortle, as if she’s _laughing_ at him, the traitor. She lays her heavy head over Byleth’s shoulder and sighs, tension bleeding out of the muscles coiled by her fury.

Byleth slept through five whole years of war at the bottom of a lake. His former Professor used to host the Goddess of Fódlan in her head until she merged with the divine being. This might as well happen.

“Alas, your gift was wasted teaching noble brats,” he announces in the most formal tone he can manage, bowing at the waist like he’s back in his father’s court receiving foreign dignitaries. Judging by the subtle crick of her eye, he’s pulling it off. “You should have been a wyvern trainer. From far beyond Fódlan, your admirers would come and stand in awe of the lady beast whisperer, appointed by the stars to tame even the most savage of wyverns.”

“And I would live in the woods with my wyverns, fishing all day long and talking to the bears, and where would that leave you?” she deadpans, but her voice is laced with amused fondness.

He blinks in wonder and flashes her a crooked grin, elated that she’s choosing to lower her guard on her own. “Lost, most certainly, like I was the five years without you. Or maybe holed up in Goneril with Hilda until the wars blows over.”

Byleth chuckles, low and quiet. The wyvern trying her best to drape around her shoulders opens a liquid amber eye to gaze at her thoughtfully.

“Then it’s a good thing I never had a knack for flying,” Byleth hums. She looks away from him to continue patting soft scales. Claude decides to approach them, busing himself by checking the new saddle and the colors that are definitely a symbol of his new Barbarossa status. It seems fitting, somehow, that his wyvern came to him from across a whole continent on her own volition just as they are about to turn the tides of this war. It contradicts everything that he’s been taught about the unreliable nature of those who represent change. Call it luck or divine intention; seeing her burning eyes has lifted his spirits more than the results of the roundtable could ever achieve.

“What is her name?”

Claude’s hands still over the headpiece. His wyvern clicks in response to the changed atmosphere.

“I have a feeling I won’t be able to pronounce it right away.” She chases his gaze from behind the white pillar of scales and oh how that makes the part of him that was the Crown Prince, the half-breed bastard of an unforgiving kingdom, want to shove the clues of his identity behind the heavy locks he’s been forging for years. Nothing given, nothing destroyed. He’s lived for so long with a dagger hidden in his sleeve, striving to find the weak spots of those around him while dancing away from their prying questions. Surviving only by clawing his way through a remorseless palace and then singing to the tone of a continent so zealous in their hatred of otherness that they would first kill each other rather than accept a helping hand. He’s seen it happen time and time again, the refusal of what’s different, both from the cold, distant nobles in their gilded Houses and the sharp rebuttal of people he considered allies.

He knows the risk that comes with trusting a fragment of himself to someone else. Yet the part of him that is both Claude and Khalid, both a friend and a confidant, who has bleed for people that are his own in a way that transcends even the meaning of the words he has to describe them, who has learned that there are so many ways to love the uniqueness of humanity, that part unfurls and whispers to take a leap of faith and _trust_.

Trust on Lysithea’s fierce determination as she pours away hours and hours in strategy planning and the subsequent bad mood she gets from lack of sleep are her effort to keep them safe. Trust that Lorenz’ haughty proclamations are his strange way of boosting their morale, and that he would dive in to help any one of them without a thought for his own safety. Trust that Leonie is out there in the field watching his back, an immovable guardian, that she won’t let anyone breach past their defenses unnoticed and she will strive to bring them home unscathed. Trust that Raphael won’t let the war sink their spirits, will hound anyone drowning on the terror of war and provide warm comfort until the panic subsides.

Trust that Ignatz, against his meek nature, won’t hesitate to defend a friend with his life, will even stumble his way through an argument if it will help someone he cares about. Trust that Marianne will stand tall for them even if the only thing emboldening her is her profound love for them, trust that she’s gotten so strong because she knows she’s loved just as fiercely. Trust that as much as Hilda whines about hating being selfless, she will be the first one to throw her life in the line if it means that her friends survive.

Trust that Byleth will stay, a faithful friend and companion and so much more he couldn’t possibly put to words, a beacon of light in this ever-consuming darkness, no matter what happens from here on out. Trust in how much he knows she cares, how all-encompassing is her sincere love, how unfair it seems to tie down how much she feels by describing it with insufficient words.

Have trust in them and, in turn, have trust in himself. Trust that his path has carried him here, that this is a reality he won’t run away from anymore, that he can allow himself to be the person he really is. Trust that what he felt that day in the ruined tower when his eyes met starlit green is what fuels his resolve in this war. Trust that when he spends his days with the former Golden Deer and their revived Professor, when they just exist outside of time, moments of laughter stolen before the cracking fire or behind a steaming cup of tea, he finds a cause worth challenging the darkness for.

At the end, they are outsiders finding each other as the stars align.

“It will certainly prove a challenge to pronounce, my friend.”

Something pools in her eyes. A brief glimmer of color that speaks of understanding far beyond this conversation alone. “Will you teach me, then? How to say her name?”

Claude feels his heart stutter and has to force down the foreboding sting of unreasonable tears. “Perhaps one day, after the war. Certainly not here where our honored guests can stumble over her beautiful syllables.”

She smiles softly, like she knows how much that confession is costing him, how frail a thing his trust is. Her understanding means more than he could ever hope to express.

“What shall I call you then?” The wyvern warbles softly at her question.

“Her name means first star of dawn. Quite a mouthful, I know. It’s not my fault she has no taste.” That gets him a warning hiss and the snapping of powerful jaws. He gives the wyvern a cheeky wink and she huffs.

Byleth hums thoughtfully, tracing spirals over white scales. “The morning star. I hope your rider is less of a handful with you, Morning Star.”

“Hey, I resent that!” Morning Star chuffs at him and he gives her a wounded look.

“Do you know the amount of poison vials I had to hide from Seteth, von Riegan?” Byleth deadpans.

“At least I kept things interesting, didn’t I?” She remains impassive but there, a faint tremble on her lips, the shadow of a smile. Score for him.

“Gave me a headache, that’s what you did.”

“Grumbling doesn’t suit you, By.”

Byleth gives him a glare that’s more fond than angry. Whatever retort she has is drowned out by Morning Star’s trumpeting roar. The wyvern jerks her head towards them and away, unfurling her wings in apparent aggravation.

Claude can’t quite contain the doting smile. “Are you sure?”

Morning Star yawns and blinks slowly, as if to say _duh_.

“That’s surprising from you, but very well. Byleth–” he gestures grandiosely towards the hulking dragon. “–care to go for a flight?”

She looks towards the wyvern, who catches her eye and preens. “Can we really ignore all the paperwork that waits for us back at the study room? We _are_ the representatives of a very powerful armada.”

“Eh, the nobles will complain regardless,” Claude shrugs. “Judith did tell me to have a break from all that squabbling and who am I to challenge her on that?”

Byleth laughs, the sound as rare as it’s precious. “I’m sure she didn’t phrase it quite like that.”

“Maybe not but can she really complain about it?” Claude grins and offers his hand, bowing as he did five years ago under the flickering lights of the Monastery’s ballroom. “Would you give me the honor of a second dance? I promise I won’t be as terrible a partner as I was for the first.”

“You say that as if I was any better,” she says and grabs his hand. He tugs her towards the wyvern, twining their fingers together as they go without really thinking about it, and Claude has the sudden understanding that this, standing together under the open sky, a moment tucked away in the stillness of time, is what he wants for the rest of his life, what five years of her absence mean now when he thinks of the future. That surprises out of him a burst of incredulous laughter because _of course_. The lingering warmth of their quiet conversations in the hallways, their words a shield from the acrimonious war raging outside. How the path is always clear if it’s her by his side. How her advice is a thing to be treasured and revered, a drop of wisdom when he desperately needs guidance. The way she smiles after a battle, shattered and mournful, and he feels the need to hold her until he can see the stars in her eyes once more, to exchange places so that it’s him who breaks if it means she won’t be haunted by the ghosts of peaceful times, by the blood that stains her sword.

How he’s long ago accepted that his dreams are not to be carried alone the same way she’s the one person he would gladly give up this war for. 

Amber eyes glance back at him smugly, Morning Star chortling her disbelief at her rider. The wyvern lashes her tail and lowers onto her belly. Byleth tilts her head in a silent question as he settles them on the saddle. He can do nothing more than drop his head on her shoulder and bury the last whispers of his laughter on the fabric. She reaches back and plants a hand on his cheek and that’s enough to melt away the last of his reservations.

“I’m so glad you came back, By,” he says with his voice raw with emotion. Her fingers twitch against his hair, tangling amongst the unruly locks like they belong there. It’s one more of the things that make her so wonderfully intricate, this ability to bring out the vulnerability in him. Byleth’s the only one that can cast out the shadows amongst the golden dunes, a force of nature that cleaves apart the very seams of the earth. 

He feels the feather-light brush of lips on his forehead, feels the soft exhalation of her breath over his nose. “How could I ever leave you?”

Claude smiles, and as they kick off towards the sky, he can see the same unguarded smile mirrored on her lips.

**Author's Note:**

> Caelestis.- the Celestial Venus; an aspect of a higher goddess, but ultimately a representation of Venus/Aphrodite, after whom the planet Venus was named, often mistaken for a star and referred to as “the morning star” due to its presence before sunrise.
> 
> .
> 
> I just love this disaster boy so much; I could gush about him all day. Given that his canon birthday is literally one day after my own (and I felt such joy when I found that out!), I had to write something for him. I had no idea what to say about Claude until my half-asleep self thought to _hell with it, wyverns are cool_ , and way too many words later, here we are.
> 
> It was supposed to only be a birthday fic but then I realized that it’s Claudeleth week and… well I just amped up the ship as far as I could.


End file.
